Safe Behind Bars
by PhantomessEponine
Summary: Mostly Javert musing. It's kinda slashy, but there's not actualy slash, more just the fond remembrance of slashy times. Or something. I don't even like slash, but this just kinda came to me when I was playing 'Stars' on the piano. Please excuse the songfi


Safe Behind Bars

I saw through him from the beginning. Monsieur Madeleine, indeed! I let him keep his charade, though. I had no real evidence short of attacking him and ripping open his shirt to reveal the branded '24601' on his chest. I think he enjoyed leading me around a bit, being the one with the power, for once. But his self-righteousness startled me. The man with the cart, for instance. Valjean's physical strength had always amazed me, but this strength of character was something new. 

Then there was the whore. What was her name? Favrielle? Felicite? It didn't matter. Did he love her? A sick wave of jealousy flooded through me. He was gone now to find her child. Was it his child as well? Why else would he care so much for a prostitute and her brat? Images of him and her clouded my mind. Valjean cradling her in the street as she begged me for mercy. Valjean clutching her hand as she lay on her deathbed. Then, Valjean threatening me with the broken chair. Valjean promising to return to me in three days time. I saw little chance of that happening. After all, he had been hiding from me for eight years, what was three more days? He seemed to have abandoned his previous life entirely. Did that include me?

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There, out in the darkness, a fugitive running, fallen from God, fallen from Grace. God be my witness. I never shall yield till we come face to face, till we come face to face.

I had to find him. There would be no stopping until I could look him in the face again. Ask him why.

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He knows his way in the dark…

Memories of my dark prison quarters. Fervent caresses and fevered kisses. For sixteen of the nineteen years he was incarcerated he found his way to my rooms unerringly, that we might indulge our passions. I never referred to it as love. 

__

…but mine is the way of the Lord.

If he could renounce me, then I could renounce him just as easily. I, too, could turn my back on the past.

__

And those who follow the path of the righteous shall have their reward. And if they fall as Lucifer fell, the flame, the sword!

My love of justice and the law must always come first. Valjean had fallen. He could have no redemption. Sweet kisses and memories of lust could not save him.

I gazed up to the Heavens, wanting to see God. I saw only stars. Cold. Constant. Strangely reassuring.

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Stars, in your multitudes, scarce to be counted, filling the darkness with order and light. You are the sentinels, silent and sure, keeping watch in the night. You know your place in the skies. You hold your course and your aim. And each in your season returns and returns and is always the same.

Who's to say God doesn't dwell in the stars? God is constant, as sure a thing as the constellation of Orion. Unfortunately, he seems to speak to me about as much as the stars do, that is to say not at all. But then I glance at them again. Soft beacons of light that have occupied those spaces for millennia. They soothed me and smoothed a blanket of peace over my troubled thoughts. Perhaps God wasn't as silent as I had thought.

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And if you fall as Lucifer fell, you fall in flame. And so it must be, for so it is written on the doorway to Paradise that those who falter and those who fall must pay the price.

So be it. God had filled me with new resolve. Valjean had transgressed against the laws of man, broken his parole. And he would be punished. Even if I never actually found him, I would never stop searching. He would be condemned to a life on the run, never sure of his safety. Never sure that I was not lurking around the next corner, waiting to arrest him. No life at all, really. Especially for that whore's child he now harbored. And yet, I loved him. 

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Lord let me find him, that I may see him safe behind bars. I will never rest 'til then.

I fell to my knees in desperate prayer. Let me find him. Let me shelter him in prison, protect him from a world that I knew too well the harsh dangers of. No doubt he knew them as well, was as familiar with if not more so than I the hideous whirlpool of sin and vice that was the slums of France. But I wanted so badly to save him. Help him. Go back to the way things were. Stolen kisses and frantic couplings in the darkness of my quarters at the prison. I would have that back. I must have that back! And I would stop at nothing to attain it.

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This I swear! This I swear by the stars!


End file.
